Abstract
This introductory chapter discusses some of the features of C++ in terms of object-orientation and other “buzzwords”, such as polymorphism and inheritance, that are used to describe the language, and also in terms of its strengths and weaknesses. Methods for editing, compiling and running a simple C++ program are introduced, followed by basic information on declaring and using variables and arrays, and on input and output. Sadly, a large amount of the time that a programmer claims to be “programming” may actually be more accurately described as “debugging”: the chapter concludes with tips about simple ways that a novice C++ programmer might go about debugging a program, thus minimising the time spent on the excruciatingly frustrating process of hunting for errors in a code.
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- 1.
Matlab is a registered trademark of The MathWorks, Inc.
- 2.
The original version of Matlab was written in Fortran and was intended as a simple interface into parts of the EISPACK and LINPACK Fortran libraries.
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If you are working on a Mac operating system, we recommend that you install the Xcode developer tool-set. This comes complete with a GNU C++ compiler which you can use on the command line or within the developer environment. If you are working on a Windows operating system, we recommend that you install MinGW (a minimal environment for using GNU tools within Windows). Alternatively, you may want something more sophisticated built on MinGW such as Cygwin (a Unix-like environment) or Code::Blocks (an open source windows development environment containing MinGW and the GNU C++ compiler).
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The “++” shorthand programming construct, which is also available in the C language, explains the original naming of the language “C++”. It is a pun which means “like C but one better”.
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For those values which fail the std::isfinite test it is possible to differentiate between infinite numbers (using std::isinf) and those which are “not a number” (using std::isnan).
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There are many open source version control systems such as CVS, Subversion, Mercurial or Git to help you with this. There are also organisations who will host your code repository for you.
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© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG, part of Springer Nature
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Pitt-Francis, J., Whiteley, J. (2017). Getting Started. In: Guide to Scientific Computing in C++. Undergraduate Topics in Computer Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73132-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73132-2_1
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